Trends in Web Design for 2017

Color

Color choice for a website is incredibly important. It can influence visitors’ emotions, thoughts, and conversion rates. So, what are going to be the color trends for 2017?

Pantone has unveiled their 2017 color of the year – Greenery. It’s been chosen as a symbol of new beginnings; a refreshing and revitalizing shade. I don’t expect every website in 2017 to be green, but I’m sure there will be several web designs inspired by this.

Due to the popularity of Google’s Material Design, the colors and color combinations recommended in those design guidelines are likely to trend upwards in 2017. These colors are bright and bold. Even outside of Material Design, there have been many examples of web designs incorporating bright colors recently.

This doesn’t show any sign of stopping anytime soon. You can use sites such as Material Design Palette and MaterialUI to help you choose a Material Design color scheme.

SVGs

Have you encountered problems on resizing logo’s and images? If so, you should try out SVG files instead of the usual PNG and JPG formats. Scalable Vector Graphics can look crisp at all screen resolutions, can have super small file sizes, and can be easily edited and modified. The SVG format only works with vector graphics, so you can’t go and infinitely scale any photos. However, it works brilliantly on logos and icons.

Scalable Vector Graphics are an XML based markup that can contain two-dimensional vectors. The vectors can be simple shapes, paths, or well just about anything you can do in Illustrator. It’s an image format that has more in common with a web page that it does with a JPEG.

SVGs have been around since 1999, but still, we see a lot of websites using the PNG and JPG formats when SVG would be the more appropriate format. This year all seems to be changing though. Google Trends data shows that interest in SVGs has been growing year on year since 2013.

Material Design

Created and designed by Google, Material Design is a design language that combines the classic principles of successful design along with innovation and technology. It is essentially built of on the principle of paper and ink, translating the qualities of these into a digital format.

As you have experienced in browsing the web, Material Design has grown in popularity, with numerous themes and templates being created for CMSs as well as front-end frameworks. Just be mindful in incorporating it to your designs because one of the criticisms you will hear of Material Design is that many of the sites using it use it very similar; perhaps too similar.

Bold, Creative Typography

This rising interest in typography is by no means a bad thing, and it makes 2016 a great time, This 2017 is likely to continue to push the boundaries of what designers will do with type. Sometimes typography is all you need to communicate your ideas effectively. Expect type to not only take up more space on screen, but also expect to see more creative typefaces than the usual web fonts you are used to.

Typography can be quite influential especially for the visitors who visit your site, and can have a positive effect on them when done correctly. The first thing that typography does is draw people in and express a general feeling about the content that a user is about to read.

Modular Design

Over the past few years Modular design has been gaining popularity and we believe that it will continue to dominate the web this 2017. Modular Design is a approach using modular, block grid pattern to lay out elements. Looking at Google Trends data shows search interest for ‘modular design’ increasing since early 2011. This positive trend could continue in 2017.

One of the best known examples of modular design is the Microsoft Metro style which doesn’t seem to be very successful, though. However, many web apps like Pinterest, Instagram, Designspiration are utilizing the grid based design very successfully.

Cinemagraphs

Cinemagraphs are still photos with elements inside them that moves on a loop. They have been causing quite a stir recently and rightfully so; a well done cinemagraph can be visually striking.

Cinemagraphs are easier and more cheap to produce than video, without it being distracting like most GIFs. They’re perfect to attract a viewers attention and great for encouraging engagement on Social media with Facebook’s and Instagram’s autoplay feature.

You may have noticed the rise of the use of these images with a twist of motion recently within social media, advertising and creative websites and/or blogs. These intriguing cinemagraphs are designed to bring a new creative edge to better express a companies’ visual identity.